Still The Girl Next Door

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Dawn Wells will never escape the notoriety she first gained in 1964 as Mary Ann Summers on TV’s “Gilligan’s Island.” But that is not something that bothers her very much.

In fact, the fourth generation Nevada native who holds a BFA in theater has maintained her gratitude for the campy show that made her character a household name. Playing the somewhat naïve, yet wholesome all-American girl next door, Wells – though educated and worldly – identified with her character’s set of old-fashioned values and farm girl work ethic.

Now nearing septuagenarian status, Wells has in the last 10 years returned to Teton Valley, Idaho, where as a girl she summered and fished with her father (her first acting gig came at age 14, playing in a melodrama at Jackson’s old Pink Garter Playhouse, now the Jackson Hole Playhouse).

This week, for the fourth year, Wells brings to Driggs and southeast Idaho the Spud Fest, a film festival on a rather quaint par to the Jackson Hole Film Festival, but one unique in its emphasis on family values and its celebration of classic television.

In conjunction with Spud Fest, Wells hopes to grow an actors’ and film and television industry workshop to a year-round undertaking that will introduce locals to new forms of expression (and career potential) and burgeoning Hollywood types to the natural aesthetics of Teton Valley.

Last week, Wells sat down with Planet Jackson Hole to talk about ongoing projects, her sense of values, and the mires of character she feels threaten the youth of America today.

Planet Jackson Hole: What is it about Spud Fest that makes it unique from other film festivals?

Dawn Wells: It is one of the very few family film festivals and one of the only film festivals that also focuses on television, and that’s one of the things that makes us different.

PJH: What is it that interests you about putting on a festival centered on so-called family values?

DW: For one thing I run a family foundation. I like to talk about that because as Mary Ann, people don’t think you have any education or any credibility or any background other than playing this sweet nice farm girl. But there’s more to me than that, and I have no children, so one of the reasons I have is wanting to pass along my 40 years in the business.

I’m a resident artist in a lot of colleges, and they tell you how to go to Broadway and they tell you how to do Shakespeare festivals, but nobody tells you anything about how to get in to the film industry as an actor. So I started with Film Actors’ Boot Camps in the summer up here. I grew up fishing with my dad here since I was 9. 

PJH: Is that why you eventually settled here, because of that connection?

DW: Yes. I lost my father to a hospital error when he was 56, so it was very hard to come back, because it was our place. But I came back and said, “Wow, why haven’t I been back here before?” That was before all this growth started.

So I came back in about ’97 – came back fishing with my family a few times – and I thought, “What a wonderful place for an artist’s soul to soar: at the foot of these mountains where it’s tranquil and quiet and you don’t have to worry about feeding your cat and the scam artists that are all over L.A.”

PJH: How were Spud Fest and the actor’s workshops born?

DW: I ran one-week boot camps for actors for two years out of my ranch, and then I came into Jackson Hole High School for two summers – you have a media department there that is quite nice – and we came over the hill, and before we moved into this building our first year, I kept seeing that [Spud Drive-In in Driggs] and I kept thinking how few drive-in film festivals are there in this country, and how many opportunities do you have to take the kids to the drive-in? It doesn’t happen like it did with my generation, and now there’s only, like, 50 left in the country. And this is one of the National Geographic registered all-wooden screen drive-ins.

I kept looking at this building [a former car dealership in Driggs] and thought “what a wonderful place for a school.” So I got a grant and got some money to get the school going, and that was before all of this growth started to happen, so I guess I was a few years before my time. It’s slow going and we’re a not-for-profit – it’s donation and sponsors and grants and stuff.

PJH:  Have you put in much of your own money?

DW: Oh, I’ve had to put a lot of my money in, but I believe if you believe in it you should. One of the things I’m very proud of is we focus on family issues, on family values. But it??s not all G-rated cartoons. You know, if we would have discussed Columbine, if the parents would have discussed what’s going on in the garage and the swastikas, we might have been able to prevent that. We need to, through some kind of entertainment – through video games, through movies, through something – keep these family values in focus.

We were one of the very first [screening venues] for “Napoleon Dynamite,” which ran as a five-minute short. And that’s a great example of young people making a clean film, and it worked and they made some money and it pleases me to say it is possible.

PJH: How does film and television fit into this little corner of eastern Idaho?

DW:  I have five or six students that just knock my socks off that came from Teton High School. There’s some real talent here and I don’t think this area had been exposed, I don’t think this part of Idaho knew what a film festival was. They didn’t know they could have the opportunity of discovering another Steven Spielberg or finding a young writer. I mean, now it’s really happening.

I’ve been on the Idaho Film Commission about encouraging film incentives to the State of Idaho, and something that’s very unique is the Idaho Potato Commission is sponsoring us. They were our very first sponsor, and I don’t know any other agricultural organization that has stepped up to the arts.

I find there to be a great number of talented kids in the valley, in eastern Idaho. I feel now there’s a real focus on supporting filmmakers because you can make a living at it. And here the collaboration between the students and the professional people is really incredible, and 100 percent of my kids who went to L.A. got agents and went to work.

PJH: Kids from this valley?

DW: I’ve had students aged 14 to 59 from all over. That’s what really makes my heart pump, is to see the kids that come through here and see the talent they have and to be able to help them go somewhere. I don’t promise them jobs, but my faculty would take them into their houses for two weeks, find them agents and help them find the best place to study.

PJH:  How would you characterize the local kids you’ve worked with? Are they from the old families here?

DW:  I’d say the Idaho kids are. The Idaho kids are really rural and raised here and, again, have grown up with family values. In this area there’s a pretty big emphasis on that, so they come with that inside of them, as opposed to some punk kid from southeast L.A. who wants to be a filmmaker. Here you’re starting with students who have the background already in their value system. So it’s a niche.

I know you’ve got a great festival going on over in Jackson, but its entirely different. You’ve got tremendous financial support in Jackson. We’re pretty small-town compared to that. But it’s fun to come and camp for the weekend and see screenings. We do our features at the drive-in, which is also fun.

PJH: How has the festival grown?

DW: It’s grown every year. Our screening rooms have become smaller, but we do more screenings now. And it’s become more national – it’s not just five or six states. I’d say we had, I don’t know, 1,250 or 1,300 people. I think we started out with 400. I’m hoping we can be a post- and pre-production studio here and an animation class as well.

PJH: How do people tend to respond to the area?

DW: We’ve had filmmakers from Carnegie-Mellon, New York, Florida, from Pennsylvania, from Colorado. Once they come here they can’t wait to come back. You hear of Jackson Hole, but you never heard of Driggs, Idaho. And they all say it’s their favorite place to be.

We’re doing classic television this year. Television was invented in Idaho, in Rigby. Do you know that story? A kid was 14, and he was standing in the rows of a potato field and he saw the sun coming down in rays, and he said, “I wonder if you could do something with the signal,” and he sat down and invented television. That man was Philo T. Farnsworth. So when you think in this little potato country, the man who invented this stuff came from here.

PJH: So, these people who come from all around, I imagine they’re quite different from the local kids from the valley here in that maybe they’re not as exposed –

DW: Well, yes and no, because with all this Internet, kids are much more sophisticated than you ever thought. They may be unsophisticated in their exposure to living conditions, but they’re not unsophisticated in their visions of what they want to say, which kind of surprised me.

PJH: You’re understaffed for the fest. Is it a pretty stressful time?

DW:  It’s very difficult because I have to keep my eye on everything. It’s my vision and there’s nobody here that’s had this experience. If you’re in L.A., there’s four producers who are out of work. Right now, Driggs is growing so fast that everybody is working for the contractors and the developers right now, so the staffing is tough.

PJH:  How does religion figure into the film fest, especially as it is often intertwined with the idea of traditional family values?

DW:  Last year we had a movie called “Blindsided,” which showed you an Islamic and a Christian friend that really had nothing to do with religion. It went right down to the gut value of these two friends. And it’s interesting because we’re in a Mormon valley here and one of the Mormon Bishops said, “I want to take this film around, this has so much to say about the world.” I don’t know that we’ve ever had a religious film, though.

PJH: This year’s first film, “Peter the Mormon Film Maker,” might suggest a religious nod, beyond that is there no palpable feel of religion?

DW: It’s nothing preachable. Idaho is a Mormon state, and I’m not LDS, however they’ve got some pretty good values. But those same values would be shared by a Methodist in Minnesota, probably. How you practice your religion is one thing, but the values of good clean living, do unto others, the golden rules, cover just about everything.

That’s something my classes should try to do, to come up with a script to see kids today’s feeling about religion. We’re not preaching anything and if there’s an atheist that wants to take that point of view in our classes, fine.

This year we have a wonderful documentary called “Living with Lew,” about a young man dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and he wants to chronicle what that’s like. We also have “Last of the Freak Shows,” so it isn’t all kiddy stuff.

PJH: How do you see change in the traditional values of this valley, with a lot of old families selling off land and so much new development coming in?

DW: I don’t know. Agriculture’s dying, but who’s coming into the valley? Are they all just second homes that don’t want to belong to the community? Or are they people who want to settle and care what happens to Driggs?

Los Angeles has a lot of people you hear about – the Lindsay Lohans and whatnot – but the real people are hardworking family people. Sherwood Schwarz produced “Gilligan’s Island,” which is the longest running television show – we’ve never been off the air since ’64 and we’re in 30 languages still.

All over the world there’s the corny little values of “Gilligan’s Island” that still hold up. I just think we’ve gone too far into violence and the lack of the value of life. I think we need to turn some of that around. And I’m not square or Puritanical at all … but I think we have an opportunity of keeping some of this alive as an industry.

I mean Disney still exists you know. Just because they’re family values doesn’t mean
they’re not good.

Photo by Jonathan Adams
Dawn Wells of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ looks to Spud Fest to promote family values on the little and silver screens.

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Still The Girl Next Door | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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